In the last month I’ve been working my way back into academic writing. I’ve been blessed with time on the project on S. Rajaratnam I started a year ago now. Since I have no formal institutional affiliation, I can work at the pace I want to, and at times it’s been useful to let things sit and percolate, and then to read more. Yet the archive is infinite and at some time you have to pause, realize you have explored as far as you need for now, and begin to write. I first wrote a shorter article for a forthcoming collection in which I was asked to adopt a more approachable, less academic voice. That’s now complete and was a useful gateway into something larger. I can now turn to the full research project. I’ve been haunting libraries. Each week I cycle up to UBC, where as an alumnus I can access Macs with big screens and all the library’s online resources. I often hunker down in the Law Library, in Allard Hall: it’s deserted in summer, with acres of wood veneer and brushed metal, quite unlike the dungeon-like atmosphere of the Education Library in Scarfe, where I spent much of my time during my Masters’. There’s a particularly beautiful reading room on higher floor, with a high ceiling and a window looking out over the roofs of Green College to Burrard inlet. You can see eagles soaring, whitecaps on the water if there’s a wind, and every hour or so the white hull of the Nanaimo ferry nudging its way past Bowen Island. At lunch I can go out onto the path behind the Museum of Anthropology and pick blackberries. On a day when my legs are weary and I don’t fancy the climb up the bike route to UBC, I’ll go to Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus in the Harbour Centre. The library there’s much smaller, and you feel somehow trapped in the 1990s, between seams of green-grey walls and bookshelves stained the colour of cherry wood. Go upstairs and turn the corner, though, and there’s a quiet study area bathed in light from a window on Richards Street. That’s where I settle in for the day.

I still have a dilemma in writing up. I’m aiming first for an academic article that will be the first in a series of three on different times in Rajaratnam’s life. This works well for me for two reasons. First, it’s a form that I’m familiar with, and that I find I can inhabit with relative ease as I come back to academic writing. I’m rusty, but the sense of shape in writing is still mostly there, even though I am faced with the challenge, later in life, of having too much to say. I’ve tried to think of why I have this fulness now, so much so that it’s sometimes difficult to follow the thread of a single argument. This is both in terms of the sheer quantity of what I know, and in terms of the fact that it can be interpreted in so many ways. That feeling, later in life, of “yes…but” that can, if you let it take possession of you, prevent you from moving forward at all.  Second, I do feel that despite the obscurity of the academic essay, writing up research in this form makes it available to a larger community on publication. My article will be listed in databases, discoverable by internet searches, and through bibliographical footnotes I can document the sources that I’ve discovered, so that others can access and build upon them. It’s a contribution to community, a series of breadcrumbs laid out into the future, for others to follow, and then to take routes of their own.

At the same time, I’m conscious that there’s something about the project that exceeds what a conventional academic essay might provide. One problem that I’ve already mentioned is length: there’s just too much information to incorporate. A second is address:  I’m interested in retrieving an intellectual past in Singapore that’s usable in current debates today, especially those around racialization and social inequality. And yet the publications by Rajaratnam that I’ve found, though important, are only the small tip of a very large iceberg, and they are very context-dependent: they are impossible to extract as usable “theory.” This leads me to questions of form: there’s something about the academic essay which fixes history and thought in a grid, that doesn’t quite allow the past to emerge in all its complexity and to be laid alongside the present.

A chance discovery, however, has led me to an intriguing method. I was reading a recent essay by Rachel Leow, part of an excellent special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on Reassessing the Chinese Diaspora from the South: History, Culture and Narrative. Leow’s essay explores the experience of the families of leftist deportees sent “back” to China from Singapore and Malaya by British colonial governments after the end of World War 2, and how this experience challenges narratives of diaspora that attempt to claim the deportees within a nationalist narrative. At one point, Leow reproduces a dialogue between a deportee and his pregnant wife who refused to accompany him: this conversation is not part of the historical record, but rather, as Leow writes, “an empathetic reconstruction of a single, elusive historical moment” that is an example of what American feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman has termed “critical fabulation.” Leow’s reference led me in turn to Harman’s writing: her dizzyingly wonderful Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, dipping in and out of lives in New York and Philadelphia in the years between the 1890s and 1930s, and then to her 2008 article “Venus in Two Acts” in which she outlines her method.

What is critical fabulation? As Hartman describes it, it’s a way of telling “impossible stories” that are missing from the archive because of the way knowledge is framed. In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman writes of her own experience of encountering the horrific violence of slavery and yet being initially unable through conventional historical methods to generate alternative stories of enslaved women from the documents that remain. Her reluctance to transgress the boundaries of the archive resulted in a form of complicity with those who had created it and the silences they enforced. How, then, Hartman wonders, might she “imagine a free state or to tell an impossible story”?

In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman gives some suggestions as to method. Critical fabulation does not attempt to retrieve the voices of those excluded from the archive, but rather emphasizes the subjunctive mood marked by doubt, possibility, and hope. In “painting a picture” of those subject to the violence of the archive, Hartman, both tells “the impossibility of a story” and amplifies the impossibility of its telling,” “straining against the limits of the archive.” Her method is marked by what she calls “narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure,” the scholar who practices it proceeds in hope, but never leaving a sense of incompleteness behind.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments embodies the practice of critical fabulation. It is made up of a series of sections, many of which focus on a single individual, and yet shift in narrational perspective. There are no footnotes marked in the text itself, but there is a supporting apparatus of notes at the end of the book, with page references, much as you have in a scholarly biography. At times, the narrative dissolves into a series of questions that foreground its provisionality; at others, italics, which the reader sometimes associates with quoted material, unfix the flow of the text. I have not been engendered by this history in the same way Hartman herself has, and for me some of the most intriguing sections were about figures who both were the medium through which violence was delivered, and yet also achieved some critical distance from this process: Hartman’s accounts of W.E.B. DuBois’s sociological work in Philadelphia, for instance, or the compromised nature of Hannah Fox and Helen Parrish’s efforts at “slum reform” in the same city.

In this blog, I’ve always worked in documenting evolving thought, rather than firm conclusions. My response to Hartman here is this very much a first draft, a note to the self to go further. I’m intrigued about how critical fabulation needs still to be supported by extensive research in the archive. And I’m also mindful that the acts of retrieving and of fabulation would be very different in the context of the anticolonial activists in London among whom Rajaratnam moved. Hartman notes that her writing is personal because she is marked by the history she explores, and the pain it engenders. I have to think more about how the project I’ve chosen is personal to me, and the source of the very different pain that my explorations bring forth. I also have the sense that you need to be a very skillful writer, as Hartman is, to pull this off. And yet I’m excited by the possibility of a historical telling that stresses doubt and foregrounds interpretation, that escapes from both romance and tragedy. If this method settles, if my doubts resolve themselves, I hope to try.